A man with many hats

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
4/28/07

Paul Pines is a poet, professor and psychotherapist — an alliterative coincidence that suits someone who sees everything in life as grist for the creative mill.

At a few weeks shy of 66, Pines has already collected several lifetimes’ worth of grist. He’s been a jazz club owner and a cabbie in New York City; a Vietnam vet who found temporary paradise on the beaches of Belize; and a novelist who dabbled in cheap erotic fiction to pay the bills.

These days, he’s living what he calls "a very suburban life, on the surface of things." He’s a husband and father, the kind of guy who seems at home in an armchair with a dog at his feet and a cluttered bookshelf at his back. He plans to retire this spring from teaching creative writing and literature at Adirondack Community College, although he will continue his psychotherapy practice at Glens Falls Hospital.

There’s a surprising lack of nostalgia in Pines’ descriptions of his bohemian past. While you could view his last two decades as comparatively dull, he gratefully calls this time "my second incarnation," a chance to reflect on things below the surface.

"There are people who go on forever collecting experiences, and they become repetitious," Pines said recently. "For me, the completion of that particular stage of my life ... freed me to grow in other areas of my life. Now my adventures are in the emotional realm."

In his latest book, "Taxidancing," a collection of poems to be published this fall by Ikon, Pines included aspects of both his past and present.

"Half of them are poems I wrote while living in the jazz world and others were written much more recently," he explained. "I thought it would be interesting to have those side by side."

The title is a play on words, adding whimsy to the mundanity of taxis weaving through traffic to pick up fares. It’s also a reference to the "taxi dancers" of the Great Depression, women who charged men by the dance for companionship. Pines is fond of images that combine beauty with a hint of something darker, and believes that pairing lies at the heart of jazz.

"The juxtaposition of sublime music and danger is really what, to some extent, jazz has been about," he said.

He recalled a jazz club he frequented in the 1960s in New York.

"It was called Slug’s Saloon, and it was like the gateway to Hades. There was this sublime music, but drugs were passed around openly, and a great trumpet player got shot right on stage."

When he opened his own jazz club, The Tin Palace, in the Bowery section of Lower Manhattan in 1970, Pines said he "took great care" not to let it go the way of Slug’s. Drug use was forbidden on the premises, although he didn’t ask what people did out on the sidewalk.

"My idea was to create an environment in this sort of no-man’s land that was safe for the arts," he said. "It became very exciting."

Some jazz greats performed at the Tin Palace during the ’70s, he said, including David Murray, Claudio Roditi, Henry Threadgill, Hilton Ruiz and Eddie Jefferson. Pines eventually closed the club and moved to Central America, but he used it as the setting for a mystery novel, "Tin Angel," published in 1983.

"Tin Angel" got strong reviews in The New York Times and other high-profile publications, was translated into several languages and even optioned for a French film (though that never materialized). It also earned Pines a six-month fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts as a writer-in-residence at Crandall Public Library.

Pines only meant to visit Glens Falls, figuring he could earn enough money here to live for a year in Belize, where, after the Vietnam War, he had bought a few acres of beachfront property with a buddy from the Merchant Marines.

But one dinner changed everything.

He met his wife, Carol — an aspiring opera singer who, it turns out, lived in uptown Manhattan at the same time he lived downtown — while tossing a salad at a mutual friend’s house.

"We kind of fell in love in about five minutes," Carol said. "I just had a sense of his tremendous depth of spirit and humor. And I know this sounds corny, but there was that sense of finding a soulmate."

As Pines puts it: "We just knew." They were married in October 1985.

His next book, "Redemption," took on U.S. involvement in a genocide in Guatemala. Pines’ agent in America said he couldn’t sell the book, although an editor in France accepted it.

"The subject matter was not what people wanted," Pines said. "I was deeply upset about not having it out in English, just devastated. I stopped writing everything except poetry for a while."

When Pines did return to book writing, his next two attempts were also rejected by an agent as "not big enough" to sell. He sees this as evidence that what used to be considered "mid-list" fiction is disappearing from the market.

"The problem is that fiction is no longer a marketable form, unless it’s genre fiction," Pines said. "We have a public that’s no longer reading. And when they do, they don’t want endings that are too dark. They want to be reassured that they will live eternally, be young and triumphant."

This doesn’t mean that writers should stop writing, Pines said. It means, he tells his ACC students, that "you had better enjoy the process, and find ways to support yourselves."

And, in his view, it doesn’t matter whether the support comes in the form of a prestigious arts grant or churning out cheap paperbacks under a pen name.

"Every moment I’ve lived is subject matter," he said. "Your moments can be as dispensable as refuse, or as valuable as you choose to make them."